


i've been ghosting alone, ghost in the world, ghost with no home

by debeauharnais



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, also i fell in love with scho's wife and now there's no going back, inspired by the song 'ghosting' by mother mother, lauri is a lesbian and she and scho deserve to be best friends and heal together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-03
Updated: 2020-03-03
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:35:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,732
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22996309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/debeauharnais/pseuds/debeauharnais
Summary: He goes away, because a part of him was never supposed to come back.He goes away, because he’s a ghost and they’re still living.He goes away, because their home doesn’t need to be haunted.He stays away for a long time, and slowly, piece by piece, he heals. He softens in the sunshine and weeps into the warmth of it.
Relationships: Tom Blake/William Schofield
Comments: 13
Kudos: 61





	i've been ghosting alone, ghost in the world, ghost with no home

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is such a mess and it was. honestly so unenjoyable to write LMAO but i just love the concept and the softness too much for it to waste away on my laptop ♡ but i hope you enjoy anyway!! x
> 
> inspired by and heavily based off the lyrics of 'ghosting' by mother mother ♡

He sits there for a long time.

He sits there in the sunshine, back against the tree – and the chalk dries into dust. His socks dry inside his boots. The ache behind his eyes turns to a dull throb, melted by the warmth into something vague and far away. He feels the dry, golden grass prickling at the backs of his thighs. He listens to the leaves above him whispering in the breeze, and the life-drunk laughter of the spared men drifting over and around the cries of the boys with holes in their chests. He smells the sun withering the wildflowers and the earth.

And he sits there.

Joe comes and sits by him for a little while. Soundless. Unmoving. Breathing in the same air and grieving that fresh grief that has already faded like dry earth into Schofield’s own skin and left him quiet, sun-warm, a sort of peculiar light-headed numb that’s almost happiness. A breath of air washes over them and drifts its fingers through his hair. He watches the light on his eyelids turn to red, to orange, to black.

Joe sits there for a little while, legs crossed and back slumped and eyes staring hazily out to the horizon where the felled cherry trees must already be beginning to wilt. Doesn’t say anything. They share some sort of silent comfort, and then Joe drags himself to his feet and wanders off somewhere. Somewhere. Schofield doesn’t open his eyes to watch him go.

He sits there for a long time.

When he does open his eyes, he feels dizzy and drunk and too warm. The world is dark with the sun still up. He blinks a few times, and stretches his fingers out against the earth, and the wound on his palm breathes back to life and begins to ache.

And then, he goes home. Back to the place that doesn’t quite fit anymore.

He waves down a supply truck, and heaves himself aboard, and it takes him half way. The other way. Not past Écoust, or the farmhouse, or the white-stone quarry. The long way. He holds onto the edge of the passenger seat with one hand, and doesn’t talk, and watches the countryside drift by with his cheek on his shoulder. The wool scratches against his skin. The driver changes gear and hiccups over stones. The noises all sound rehearsed and easy.

They pass the river. A different stretch of it. The water is calm and dark in the dappled shadows of oaks and elms and chestnut trees. He watches the white foam on the surface.

They cross a bridge and crunch and jolt over the cobblestones, and when they reach a stretch of flat meadow, the driver slows to a stop and says something impatient and taut. Schofield stumbles onto the dirt road, and the truck drives away, and the dust clears, and he begins to walk south. The fields are golden and quiet in the still air. Birds sing from the distant trees. The sun washes over their leaves like melted honey. He lifts his feet, and puts them down, and they work, and he walks, slow and heavy and warm beneath the endless blue sky.

He goes south, and then he’s home. Walking across the raised earth behind the trenches, he can see No Man’s Land beyond. The sun is up and there’s no mist now. It looks quiet and peaceful. He stops and stares at it for a long time, eyes glazed and shoulders heavy and head silent. Eventually he thinks, vaguely and numbly, _there’s nothing to be afraid of out there now. I don’t know why I ever thought there was._

He staggers down into a trench and it swallows him up. No one says anything to him. They haven’t noticed he’s been gone at all. They chat as they sit, as they walk, as they restring barbed wire, and he stumbles his way through them, jostled this way and that by shoulders and elbows and laughter. No one notices him. He’s just a ghost. They keep on laughing, loud and alive. They don’t think they are, but he can see it. They’re still so alive.

“You’re back, then?” Sanders asks, standing up from the mud to watch him pass. Schofield doesn’t answer. He staggers on. Sanders raises his voice. “Where’s Blake?” He doesn’t try to follow him. The question drifts away into the walls of the trench as he turns the corner.

Schofield feels sunshine on his ears. His head rises above the trench as he walks out into the meadow of mess tents. Someone is doing laundry in one of those big metal vats, swirling the uniforms round and round with a stick. It smells hot and damp and dirty. No one looks up. No one sees him. They keep talking and smoking and eating. Their laugher is louder than the birdsong.

He goes to the aid tent, and they peel away the bandage and stitch up his head and his palm. He sits there silently. _Dehydration,_ they say. _Concussion. A hair away from hypothermia. Half a hair away from septicaemia. Cough into this bucket; there’s fluid in your lungs._

“How’d you do this, then?” they ask. “Not the usual mess we get in here.” He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t know how to. They don’t know he was gone. They haven’t left the trenches in three years. They don’t know there’s things like cherry trees and orphaned foundlings and burning churches beyond it. They don’t know things like that still exist. No one ever will. He’ll just be another black-and-white face of a nameless soldier in a grainy photograph, and they won’t know all the things he’s seen. He suddenly feels bone-crushingly tired.

They didn’t know he was gone, and none of what he saw matters, and no one will remember it, and he’s tired. The world here never stopped. The girl and the baby will die. His head hurts. Blake is dead. And no one even noticed.

He leaves the aid tent, and goes to the mess tent to sit on the edge of a bench with a rowdy bunch of men on the other end and silently eats and drinks and forgets what he ate and drank the moment it’s done. He leaves the mess tent and goes to the officers’ dugout, reaching an arm out and pushing his way into the warm, suffocating darkness. The General isn’t there anymore. He salutes. The Lieutenant who gave him the box of treats looks up and tells him with a polite, overly warm sort of interest like he’s forgotten there were two Lance Corporals sent out at all, _the General was called back to Command; I’ll send him a report this evening_ , and then he looks back down to his paperwork and Schofield is left standing there until an orderly holds the black cloth open for him as an invitation to be on his way.

It was just a mission. The General was probably on his way back to Command while they were still picking their way across No Man’s Land. Just a mission. No one really cared. No one cares now.

Schofield stumbles back down the trench, blind and numb and at peace. Happy. Content. It’s odd, a soft, faraway part of him thinks, the things grief can make you feel.

He sits back against their tree, and no one says a thing, and as the men laugh and chatter and brawl playfully around him, he sleeps.

The months pass, and he doesn’t really feel them.

He writes a letter home to Blake’s mother.

He goes on wiring duty up the line.

His palm heals to a neat white line, and after a little while that begins to fade as well.

An envelope comes with a medal. Sanders gives it to him like that, like he thinks Schofield doesn’t know what it is, like he thinks he’ll get a surprise out of it. His name is spelled wrong on the front. _Scofield_. He aches under the heaviness of Sanders’ smile.

Passchendaele begins in July.

The war ends.

When he gets home, he isn’t good for his wife.

He tries to be. Their cottage at the end of the street is warm and quiet and soft, and the flowers are in bloom, and the shadows on the bedroom wall at golden hour are gentle and dusty and suffocating, and he tries. The neighbours come round for tea to welcome him home. His daughters play out on the street in the sunshine and their shouts and squeals are muffled by the kitchen windows and the lace curtains and the walls settling around him like a warm, heavy skin. The books are where he left them. The birds sing. The cranberry jam on the toast tastes the same.

He tries.

But the nights are hard, when the fragile happiness he manages to cobble together in the daylight fades with the dust motes and the dusk, and he isn’t good for her. He’s a ghost out of his grave, a thing to haunt the stairs and the kitchen beams and the soft sunshine. And she’s alive. So gently, wonderfully, quietly alive.

And he thinks, _what a terrible life I have made for you_.

Because his wife is a wild, untamed thing. She goes on long walks alone and splashes through creek beds and stays up reading till three in the morning. She argues loudly and climbs fences and pulls up her skirts to chase their daughters around the garden and paints nude ladies. She’s popular and universally beloved, a thing of awe and reverence and fierce love in the village, always being dragged off down the pub he’d feel out of place in to tell endless stories and laugh her throat raw – and most of them still wonder why she’d ever married such a quiet fellow as he when she is such a free, fearless flame. But she is kind, impossibly kind, and safe and loving and good, and he loves her freedom above all else. She is his hero and his best friend.

And now, she’s reduced to tiptoeing around a husband with shell holes for eyes.

And so, one morning, while his wife keeps their daughters busy with their breakfast, he stays in the warm quiet of their bedroom with the curtains open and shadows pooling in the corners, and he folds. He folds his pillowcase, and his towels, and all the white linen and cotton that still smells more of his wife and her warm, living house than it does of him. He leaves them neat and tidy on his side of the bed, and he lingers in the kitchen doorway behind his daughters’ backs and waits for his wife to turn away from the stove.

And when she does, she meets his gaze, a checked tea-towel in her hands, and her eyes are wet and her cheeks red, and he smiles at her, and she smiles back, chin quivering and eyes so quietly kind. And he leaves.

He goes away, because a part of him was never supposed to come back.

He goes away, because he’s a ghost and they’re still living.

He goes away, because their home doesn’t need to be haunted.

He stays away for a long time, and slowly, piece by piece, he heals. He softens in the sunshine and weeps into the warmth of it. He makes tea, and sits by the open window, and drinks it in the silence of the birdsong and the rustling leaves. He finds new books in old, rambling bookshops, and sits in the warm shadows of the late afternoon to read them, and sometimes he’s so happy, so thankful, to be able to laugh at something small and meaningless in the words that tears slip down his cheeks.

He listens to the soft ticking off the clock in the cotton wool quiet of the early morning, and carefully folds his bed every day, and gathers flowers to put in a vase by the window. He watches the golden shadows drift across the paintings on the wall in the evening, wanders quietly down village lanes, and slowly, softly, when he’s on those walks, he begins to feel like a living thing. He begins to feel the sunshine on his skin. He begins to notice the people smiling at him as he passes, vague, polite English smiles that mean nothing, and he smiles back with all the light of the sun in his eyes – because he’s there, and he sees them, and they see him.

He reads by the ruddy light of his bedside lamp, and bakes bread, and sketches watercolours of leaves and flowers and teacups in the garden. He makes his bed, and remakes it the next morning. He wanders down village lanes, and smiles at the people passing him by, and stops to talk to the old woman in the bakery, and slowly, softly, tenderly, in the sunshine and in the late evening birdsong, he heals.

The scar on his palm heals.

Blake’s mother writes him three times a week.

The ghosts fade to warm, quiet things in the sunlight – always there, always welcome. He lets them in, because the ghost of a kind boy with blossoms in his hair and a thousand funny stories isn’t a ghost he wants to keep locked beyond his front door.

Sometimes he dreams of a howling baby starving in the shadows of a cellar, and a girl wailing out for him, and white, gaping faces staring at him from the earth. Sometimes he dreams of shells spraying up dead, dark earth, and embers drifting into milk, and Blake bleeding out in his arms. Sometimes he dreams of the whispering of leaves and the voice of the boy in the forest and burning church bells counting up to six.

But sometimes he dreams of sunshine washing over Blake’s smile, and curtains fluttering in the springtime breeze, and peace.

Sometimes he dreams of peace.

And then, one day, while he’s smearing jam onto bread and humming along to some nameless tune, with the window wide open and the smell of blooming flowers filling the kitchen, he realises it isn’t just a dream anymore.

Slowly, softly, he heals.

Slowly, softly, he realises he’s at peace.

The ghosts still haunt, the memories still scream, the trenches still bury him alive. But the sun burns brighter.

He isn’t the same as he was before. He’ll never be like that again.

But he’s something else. Something soft, something a little broken, something healed.

And then, one day, the world forgives him.

One day, the world offers him a breath, and it says, _take it,_ and with shaking fingers, he does – and for the first time in years, he exhales and fills his lungs with nothing but golden air and gentleness.

The girl staring up at him on the step of his front door is a little older, a little softer, but it’s her. He knows her the second he sees her. There’s a toddler in her arms, a little girl with a round face and golden hair, and it’s her. It’s them. Schofield lets out a sob, a horrible, wonderful sob, and bundles her gently in his arms, and buries his face in her hair – and she clings to him, and begins to weep as well, and for a long, long time, they just hold each other with the little girl hidden safely between them and the smell of smoke and rot long since washed out of all three of them.

And when they finally draw apart, their eyes red and wet and swollen and their cheeks sore from smiling, he steps aside and welcomes her and the child in.

“What is her name?” he asks as he pours tea for the both of them, voice just as gentle as it had been in Écoust but a great deal less haunted.

 _I don’t know,_ the ghost answers. “Adalene,” the real girl says. She looks up at him from where she’d been watching her daughter spill watercolour ink over the kitchen floor. Neither of them scold her. A flaming church is just a ruin, and a floor is just a floor.

“What is your name?”

“Lauri.”

“How did you find me?”

“I looked.” He sets the teacup down in front of her. “What is your name?”

“Will.”

They live together for a little while – not in an intimate way, because Schofield doesn’t think he’ll ever be ready for that again, and because she’s everything his daughters could grow up to be, and because if he could have stayed in that cellar and protected this teenage girl he would have, but in an _I so need a friend_ sort of way. A friend who understands. A friend who knows.

And together, they heal a little bit more.

Schofield spends late afternoons by the fire frowning down at books and breathing soft French to himself. Lauri spends mornings by the open living room window, the room pale in the early sunlight and a gentle breeze brushing through the rose bushes and her quiet murmurings filling the room as she reads English to herself.

But they don’t really need words anyway. She saw him with blood on the back of his head and Blake’s death still crusted under his fingernails. He saw her with fear a black, living thing in her eyes and famine hollowing out her cheekbones. They don’t need words.

What they have is snow on the hedges at Christmas.

What they have is silent strolls at midnight, because pubs are claustrophobic with hot, red flames and drunken men and Lauri’s had enough of those.

What they have is a gentle New Years at home – biscuits and stories and counting down by the fire.

(And this time, the memory of New Years before the war – making little flower bouquets at the kitchen table, and baking by candlelight, and watching from the warm orange light of the doorway as his wife and daughters playing and squealing in the night-time garden, and his wife cheering at the top of her lungs and twirling their girls around when the clock strikes midnight; and then, every year, her friends would knock on the front door and drag her away for a proper celebration at the pub, and he and their girls would stand in the doorway and smile and wave and call after her, and he’d settle them down in their beds with a warm, peaceful weight in his chest because always knew he’d feel awkward and out of place there but that she’d thrive, and he loved seeing her go off somewhere where she would be happy and loved – this time, the memories don’t hurt. This time, they just feel like home.)

What they have is freedom, time for each other and time alone.

What they have is warm, quiet summer days in the garden, eyes closed and heads tilted back to the sun. What they have is walks to the bookshop and market days and Adalene making friends with girls she meets while she’s playing on the cobblestones outside the little art gallery.

“Poor little rose,” an old woman says one day, watching Lauri kneel down to smooth Adalene’s hair back and croon to her in French. Schofield stops in the doorway of the grocer’s, brown paper bag in his arms and chin tucked into his throat as he listens. “Did you lose your fellow in the war? It’s a terrible thing for a child like that to lose a father.”

“No,” Lauri answers immediately, looking up at her with that fierce, frustrated innocence that comes from never having learned that what she feels ought to be _wrong_. “Girls, _girls_.”

What they have is _you and I are the same_.

What they have is _the boy I loved is buried back in France._

What they have is _the girl I loved is buried there as well._

What they have is _I think you’re becoming my best friend_ – slowly, quietly, in the cold of winter and in the new growth of spring.

And then, one morning, he goes home.

He feels _ready_ to go home.

He opens the front door, and the house smells like bread and herbs and laundry drying in front of the fire. The mid-morning sunshine is warm and soft and golden and it spills through the curtains and turns the garden to a painting.

His wife pokes her head into the hallway and greets him with a gentle, tired smile. _You’re back,_ it says. _Welcome home._

His daughters stare up at him from behind her skirts. _You’re back,_ they say, timid and untrusting. _Are you a ghost anymore?_

And he crouches down, and smiles, and opens his arms – and the warmth of the world rushes back in.

Lauri pokes her head through the doorway with Adalene clinging to her calves, and Schofield explains as much as he can without saying very much at all – and Abigail understands, because her heart is as fiery and unbroken as her spirit, and she pulls Lauri close and holds her to her, and Lauri holds her back, and Adalene runs off to play with his daughters, and he’s home.

That night, he opens his old trunk. With the birds quietly warbling the last of their songs outside the window and with the voices and laughter of all the ones he loves wafting up the stairs from the kitchen, he takes out his uniform – and slowly, gently he folds it, neat and tidy and final, and places it in the cupboard, and closes the door.

Summer is long and calm and warm, and the cherry tree blooms its first flowers in their garden, and somewhere along the way he and Abigail, with soft smiles and without words, understand – for now, all they need to be for each other is best friends. No husband, no wife – just William, and Abigail, and Lauri, and three young girls with their whole lives in front of them.

Summer is long and calm and warm, and the late afternoon shadows drift across the hallway walls, and golden hour fills their home with honey, and the wildflower in the countryside meadows breathe themselves back to life – and the skies are pale blue, and the sunshine is endless and the shadows cool and dark, and slowly, slowly, they heal. 


End file.
